Do 20 consecutive words deserve copyright protection?
One problem with copyright is that it lasts too long, as an earlier post on this blog explored. But there’s another issue: the fact that copyright protects even very short texts. This was an issue in a recent court case in Sweden, discussed on The IPKat blog. Unusually, perhaps, for a copyright case, it concerned …
Moving beyond dysfunctional copyright: true fans, and a new middle class for the creator economy
It’s easy pointing out that copyright is deeply dysfunctional: there are new examples of the profound mismatch between this 18th-century law and 21st-century creativity coming to light every day. Much harder is devising alternatives that are not niche solutions, but which have a wide applicability. One of the first people to do this was Kevin …
Until the recording industry’s monopoly power is broken, musicians may need to go independent
We’ve just written about the terrible deal that most musicians get from the increasingly-popular streaming of their music. A post on Boing Boing explores another aspect of the same problem: the fact that musicians aren’t generally paid according to how many people listen to their music on streaming, but according to their share of the …
We don’t have walled culture because of piracy, but because of corporate profiteering
Last week, Universal Music Group (UMG) went public on Amsterdam’s Euronext exchange, and ended up with a valuation of 45 billion euros (over $50 billion). An article on Quartz explained: The strong public debut signaled a win for the recorded music industry, which struggled to maintain revenues and profitability in the early 2000s as physical …
Yet another move to funnel money to big copyright companies, not struggling creators
When modern copyright came into existence in 1710, it gave a monopoly to authors for just 14 years, with the option to extend it for another 14. Today, in most parts of the world, copyright term is the life of the creator, plus 70 years. That’s typically over a hundred years. The main rationale for …
Unleashing the power of online sharing for all: the birth and rise of Creative Commons
Effortless copying lies at the heart of the Internet. As digital data is passed from location to location, copies of it are made at the intersection of the networks that form the Internet (inter-net). Copyright, on the other hand, is designed to control every copy of a creative work, including digital ones. That inherent contradiction …
Breaking down the walls: UK government supporting open science and open research
It’s not just culture that suffers because of walls built by copyright: science, too, has a terrible problem in this regard. In some ways, that’s even worse, since copyright often prevents the free, frictionless flow of information in the form of academic papers, reports, books etc. that will lead to more research and more discoveries. …
Welcome to Walled Culture
The modern world is digital. We meet people online, we buy things online, we deal with the government online. But the digital sphere is not just the latest version of the traditional, analogue world. It is fundamentally different. Once something is digital, it can be copied perfectly and infinitely. That allows digital objects to be …